Part...1...The Mammoth Story

Elephants are the largest living land mammals. There have

Part 1: Elephants

been more than 500 different kinds of elephants on the Earth at

various times over the last 55 million years. Only two of these

remain alive today: the African Elephant and the Asian (or

Indian) Elephant. They are restricted to tropical climates, but

other species, living long ago, were more adapted to colder

climates. These include the mammoths. The remains of four of

the extinct species have been found in British Columbia: the

Woolly Mammoth, the Columbia Mammoth, the Imperial Mammoth and the Mastodon.

In northern areas of the world, mammoth finds tend to cluster in

time periods when exposed soil and moisture were moving

sediments downslope and especially when sediments are

moving in front of glaciers. Ironically, these were times when

mammoths were not particularly abundant, but it was more

likely that bones lying on the ground would get buried during

these conditions. It is this situation that has preserved many of

the fossils found in British Columbia.

Frozen mummified mammoths have been found in Siberia and Alaska. The most famous are

the Siberian Beresovka mammoth (excavated in 1901), the Dina mammoth (a complete

carcass of a six-month-old baby discovered in 1977) and a mummified baby mammoth, less

than three months old, found in Siberia in 1988. No frozen mammoths have been found in

British Columbia. Most of the finds here are molars, tusks or leg bones; only a few times

have substantial portions of a mammoth skeleton been found.

How closely related were these ancient beasts to the modern elephants? The order of mammals

that includes modern and fossil elephants is called Proboscidea. The name derives

from the Greek words pro for "before" and boskein, meaning "to feed". The earliest

proboscideans were plant eaters about as big as a pig or cow. They did not have tusks and

are defined by characteristics such as the cusp patterns on their teeth and the architecture

of the skull. Modern day manatees (sea cows) and hyraxes shared this common ancestor with

elephants before they began to spread from Africa about 50 million years ago.

The elephants that came to the western hemisphere include the gomphotheres, the mammut

(mastodon) and mammuthus (Southern Mammoth, Steppe Mammoth and Woolly Mammoth).

Some scientists lump the northern mid-latitude mammoths under the name Steppe Mammoth,

while others see distinct types adapted to regional environments,

such as the Imperial Mammoth of the wetter

coastal regions.

The modern Asian and African elephants began to

evolve as different species before about two million

years ago. It was after this that the mammoths diverged

from the Asian Elephants. The Woolly Mammoth was,

therefore, more closely related to the Asian Elephant

than the African. As there is one know case of a pair of

Asian and African elephants producing a live (albeit

short-lived) offspring, it may have been possible for a

Woolly Mammoth to cross-breed with an Asian Elephant

if the former were alive today. And it would not be preposterous

to consider the

prospect of impregnating

a living female Asian

Elephant with viable genetic material from a frozen mammoth

to create a living elephant-mammoth hybrid. Unfortunately,

the genetic material found in frozen mammoths so far has not

been complete enough to attempt this procedure.

Mammoths were comparable

in size to the largest living

elephant, the Savannah Elephant, an African subspecies,

which weighs 4 to 7 tons and is 3 to 4 metres tall at the shoulder.

The other African subspecies, the Forest Elephant, is

substantially smaller, weighing 2 to 4 tons. The Asian Elephant

has three subspecies, the Sri Lankan (3 to 5 tons), Mainland

(2.5 to 4.5 tons) and Sumatran (2 to 4 tons). All have different

characteristics, such as skin colour, ear and tusk shape, and

bone structure.

Mammoths had spiral locks of black or dark brown guard hairs covering shorter, silkier

underfur. Both males and females had tusks. The trunk of a Woolly Mammoth had a hand-like

tip that would have been very effective in gathering short grasses or scooping up snow to

expose plants. Male mammoths matured at about age 20; we can tell they matured slowly by

examining the growth layers in their teeth.

Most mammoth finds in British Columbia are fossilized molar teeth. Besides the tusks, which

are really incisor teeth, an elephant uses only two pairs of molars (upper and lower) at any one

time. Each molar is replaced with a larger one up to six times during the elephant's life. When

the last molar is worn down, the elephant cannot eat and dies. An African Elephant can live

50 to 60 years before its last set of molars wears down; but the teeth of an Asian Elephant

take longer to wear, so it can live up to 80 years.

A mammoth's teeth were high-crowned and complex, more so than teeth of living elephants.

Efficient use of sparse, low-quality winter forage was critical to survival, and any additional

grinding surface was an advantage in chewing grass and leaves and slowing down tooth

wear. Over time, loops of enamel were added until mammoth teeth from the late Pleistocene

became the most complex of any proboscidian.

Mammoths were ideally suited for the grassy steppes of the northern hemisphere. How did

they come to North America, and why did they die off? How do we know as much as we do

about mammoths?